Atheism Plus/Free Thought Blogs (FTB)

[shuttlt]

It's just a math problem involving controls.

eg:

|High|Low
White|100|80
Black|70|40

Results:
Penalty for low Class: 20%
Penalty for black Race: 30%

The key is that you need examples in all categories to isolate impacts of each property.

I agree that if one wanted, and had the resources, there is much more that could be teased out of this. I'm pretty comfortable with regression analysis. You'd need to gather the data though.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I suppose it is.

So?

I think this illustrates where traditional liberals and critical thinkers part ways with the modern, on-line "social justice" warriors.

Traditional liberalism is based on the idea that everyone is equal in some very important if very abstract way, deserving of respect, deserving to be treated as an individual and so forth.

Critical thinking is based, among other things, on consistency. You should treat like cases alike.

When a traditional liberal and critical thinker notices that they are proposing a sexist belief or policy they need to do some serious soul-searching to determine whether there is in fact some really, really good reason to behave in a seemingly sexist manner, because it somehow does bring about more long-term equality and/or liberty. If they can't find such a reason, they need to change their views.

When an A-plusser notices they are being sexist, racist or otherwise bigoted they can respond with "So?". Their doctrines aren't internally answerable to consistency, fairness, liberalism or even common sense. They just exist, and you are held to be a good or bad person based on whether or not you accept them as unconditionally morally perfect.

 

[shuttlt]

Critical thinking is based, among other things, on consistency. You should treat like cases alike.

I don't know. Surely critical thinking is about "is" rather than "ought". Colander acknowledges that the two things may both be sexist. I don't see that critical thinking demands that since they are both sexist then he/she must care about them equally. Saying that they are both examples of sexism doesn't mean that one can't have a consistent analysis of the situation that treats one as significant, and one not.

 

[colander]

I think this illustrates where traditional liberals and critical thinkers part ways with the modern, on-line "social justice" warriors.

Traditional liberalism is based on the idea that everyone is equal in some very important if very abstract way, deserving of respect, deserving to be treated as an individual and so forth.

Critical thinking is based, among other things, on consistency. You should treat like cases alike.

When a traditional liberal and critical thinker notices that they are proposing a sexist belief or policy they need to do some serious soul-searching to determine whether there is in fact some really, really good reason to behave in a seemingly sexist manner, because it somehow does bring about more long-term equality and/or liberty. If they can't find such a reason, they need to change their views.

When an A-plusser notices they are being sexist, racist or otherwise bigoted they can respond with "So?". Their doctrines aren't internally answerable to consistency, fairness, liberalism or even common sense. They just exist, and you are held to be a good or bad person based on whether or not you accept them as unconditionally morally perfect.

That's really interesting. It makes a lot of sense, because one time I got angry at a pigeon and threw a kaiser roll at it but the pigeon just dodged my roll and then started to eat it.

I now realize that that hypocritical pigeon must have been a traditional liberal.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I don't know. Surely critical thinking is about "is" rather than "ought".

Nope. A competent critical thinker who is committed to any "ought" claims is committed to applying those claims consistently. I'm not saying that all critical thinkers agree on which "ought" claims are important or should be followed, but I am saying that you are not a competent critical thinker if you apply "ought" claims inconsistently.

Colander acknowledges that the two things may both be sexist. I don't see that critical thinking demands that since they are both sexist then he/she must care about them equally.

I don't see where I said anything like that.

Saying that they are both examples of sexism doesn't mean that one can't have a consistent analysis of the situation that treats one as significant, and one not.

I don't see where I said anything contradictory to that.

 

[qwints]

squealpiggy, what proxy would you use for class as opposed to education or wealth in order to test for it? How would you qualitatively or quantitatively measure it? And are any minorities "high class" in the US? I don't think anyone in this thread doubts classism (at least in terms of socio-economic status) exists, just that not all racism can be explained by classism.

Given that "black" names are "a strong signal of socio-economic status", how does one know whether and to what extent the CVs in the study are being discriminated against on the basis of perceived race, or perceived socio-economic status?

First, the Fryer and Levitt study showed distinctively black names only had a disadvantage at the the resume review level and not on employment outcomes. As they note, one reasonable explanation is that distinctively black names just get discriminated against earlier while black people with ambiguous people experience that same discrimination at a later stage in the hiring process.

Secondly, socioeconomic discrimination was clear in the application study but it wasn't correlated with race. Black names didn't negate the advantage of a rich zip code, and a rich zip code didn't negate the disadvantage of a black name. If those variables were both just indicators of class, you wouldn't expect them to be independent.

Finally, a host of other studies support the idea that employers in the US still are less likely to hire white people. Sending in testers consistently finds discrimination.* Actual audits have found that black applicants do worse. Experimental testing finds even people who express no racial animus seem to harbor an automatic preference for their own race, with whites doing so at higher rates than blacks in the US.



*(To speak briefly of another domain, I've done fair housing testing. It was really eye opening as a white male to call an apartment complex shortly after a black woman does, and find that an apartment has magically opened up.)

 

[Skiltch]

So, I'm watching Joe Rogan's most recent podcast and he's talking about this PZ Myers/Micheal Shermer thing. He brought up the word "privilege" which I'd only seen in that context in this thread. I thought it was interesting. His guest is Buck Angel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFe1xEGtpjA
(they start talking about this around 1 hour 20 minutes in).

Joe Rogan is a bit of nut sometimes (see for instance conspiracy theories). But I like him. Thought you guys might be interested in this bit of conversation.

I liked this bit, in reference to PZ Myers:
"To call yourself a skeptic? That's not what they're doing anymore, what they're doing is getting social brownie points. They're bathing in the glowing adoration of their followers."

(something like that, it's hard to type that fast).

Well, of course, he's Not A Skeptic anymore. He announced his rejection of that label, as I recall. As did many of his commenters.

I am still stunned that so many atheists, all ostensibly critical thinkers, were so proud to jump up and declare that they're not skeptics. I mean, I get that they meant that they aren't part of Organized Group Skepticism (which apparently consists of those dedicated bigfoot-denouncers and Eucharist-scoffers I mentioned in my previous post) and that they still maintain skeptical thought, but it's frustrating for two reasons.

First, the same people kept making comments about skepticism being trivial, mundane, even equivalent to tooth-brushing in its ubiquity and simplicity (Chris Clarke said that one, I believe), but ignore that a great many people still haven't mastered this 'mundane' skill. Homeopaths, dowsers, psychics, and churches still have customers. Religious ideology has infiltrated a great many governments. For all that skepticism is allegedly so trivial that it isn't meaningful as a label, it still hasn't penetrated into a lot of minds. (And this gets back to how skeptical and atheist outreach is in fact important; it's not all just laughing at idiots and 'whining about nativity scenes.')

Second, the same people that are all, "I'm not a Skeptic and I don't identify as such, but I still think skeptically about things," and then went on to join A+ don't seem to realize the contradiction. A+ isn't about skepticism at all, except of very specific, targeted groups (e.g., 'the privileged.') When someone who isn't part of such a group proposes something, A+ dictates that their argument be automatically validated, not critically examined from a skeptical perspective. The people leaving Skepticism for A+ are in fact leaving skepticism, little 's', too, whether they admit it or not.

 

[shuttlt]

First, the Fryer and Levitt study showed distinctively black names only had a disadvantage at the the resume review level and not on employment outcomes. As they note, one reasonable explanation is that distinctively black names just get discriminated against earlier while black people with ambiguous people experience that same discrimination at a later stage in the hiring process.

I don't dispute this.

Secondly, socioeconomic discrimination was clear in the application study but it wasn't correlated with race. Black names didn't negate the advantage of a rich zip code, and a rich zip code didn't negate the disadvantage of a black name. If those variables were both just indicators of class, you wouldn't expect them to be independent.

I will reread the studies, but at present this is the part I disagree with.

Finally, a host of other studies support the idea that employers in the US still are less likely to hire white people. Sending in testers consistently finds discrimination.* Actual audits have found that black applicants do worse. Experimental testing finds even people who express no racial animus seem to harbor an automatic preference for their own race, with whites doing so at higher rates than blacks in the US.

I'm not arguing about other studies, I'm arguing about this study.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

We were having quite a nice conversation about class, race and employment discrimination when...

...when your response to a question about sexism reminded me of one of the reasons why the A+/FTB communities' (you know, the actual thread topic) attitudes to social justice are fundamentally at odds with both traditional social justice and actual critical thinking.

Sorry if I brought the thread back on topic.

The fact that your response has been to try as hard as you can to personalise the debate has reminded me of yet another reason why the A+/FTB communities annoy me.

 

[squealpiggy]

squealpiggy, what proxy would you use for class as opposed to education or wealth in order to test for it?

I actually think that the methodology of Bertrand and Mullainathan is sound when it comes to gauging attitudes to names. I just think that the assumption that they made is that people discriminate by names and that the reason for this is racist. There needed to be more names in the study. Throw in some ethnic names, some uniquely spelled "white" names (which would indicate lower social classes among white people) and maybe even some distinctively African names for comparison.

I would be interested to see the distinction between providing resumes of people with African names and people with distinctively African American names. My guess is that you would see a similar disparity in responses because African names would be perceived as belonging to a higher social class than the sorts of names mentioned in the study.

You can't control for prejudicial attitudes to names by providing the zip codes of wealthy areas on the resumes. The hypothesis that employers will react in a prejudicial manner to names on a resume regardless of content is a sound one. Trying to control that in the address field makes little sense.

How would you qualitatively or quantitatively measure it? And are any minorities "high class" in the US? I don't think anyone in this thread doubts classism (at least in terms of socio-economic status) exists, just that not all racism can be explained by classism.

At no point have I suggested that all racism can be explained by class, nor do I think this is a viable proposition. I just think that this particular study is deeply flawed in its assumptions but is a huge favourite for the social justice crowd because it seems to confirm their bias about the world.

 

[shuttlt]

Secondly, socioeconomic discrimination was clear in the application study but it wasn't correlated with race. Black names didn't negate the advantage of a rich zip code, and a rich zip code didn't negate the disadvantage of a black name. If those variables were both just indicators of class, you wouldn't expect them to be independent.

I will reread the studies, but at present this is the part I disagree with.

At present I don't see where they show that the "blackness" of a name is independent of their proxy for class. Could you indicate where you are getting this?

 

[qwints]

I just think that this particular study is deeply flawed in its assumptions but is a huge favourite for the social justice crowd because it seems to confirm their bias about the world.

Here's my problem. It's one thing to argue that the study failed to adequately control for a potential confounder or suggest methods for additional studies. (I was actually surprised when I looked for but couldn't find studies that replicated the methodology but used additional controls).

It's another to argue that the race therefore just shows class discrimination. Especially when you make bad or irrelevant arguments to support this discrimination, use language to disparage the authors as ideologically driven, and ignore the fact that the author's "assumptions" are based on the literature review given at the beginning of the study. Those are the sorts of tactics you see in denialism in other domains.

Just as you've seen the "social justice crowd" use this study to "confirm their bias," I've seen people who seem to me determined to deny any evidence of societal injustice bash this or other studies and miss the forest for the trees.

@shuttIt, this is what I'm referring to:

BERTRAND AND MULLAINATHAN
III. Results
C. Applicant's Address:

In columns 2, 4, and 6, we further interact the zip code characteristic with a dummy variable for whether the applicant is African-American or not. Each of the probit regressions in these columns also includes an African-American dummy, a city dummy, and an interaction of the city dummy with the African-American dummy. There is no evidence that African-
Americans benefit any more than Whites from living in a Whiter, more educated zip code. The estimated interactions between fraction White and fraction college educated with the African- American dummy are economically very small and statistically insignificant. We do find an economically more meaningful effect of zip code median income level on the racial gap in
callback; this effect, however, is statistically insignificant.

In summary, while neighborhood quality affects callbacks, African-Americans do not benefit more than Whites from living in better neighborhoods. If ghettos and bad neighborhoods are particularly stigmatizing for African-
Americans, one might have expected African-Americans to be helped more by having a "better" address. Our results do not support this hypothesis.

 

[shuttlt]

Here's my problem. It's one thing to argue that the study failed to adequately control for a potential confounder or suggest methods for additional studies. (I was actually surprised when I looked for but couldn't find studies that replicated the methodology but used additional controls).

It's another to argue that the race therefore just shows class discrimination. Especially when you make bad or irrelevant arguments to support this discrimination, use language to disparage the authors as ideologically driven, and ignore the fact that the author's "assumptions" are based on the literature review given at the beginning of the study. Those are the sorts of tactics you see in denialism in other domains.

Who has been claiming that the race just shows class discrimination. The problem as I see it is that if you doubt/deny that race descrimination exists, or exists here, this study isn't a problem, because it doesn't control for all the other things we have been talking about. So anybody who doesn't already agree with argument this study is being used to support won't find the study remotely persuasive. So what is the point of the study? All it shows is that when presented with a huge pile of CVs, at least some, employers filter to some degree on information in aparantly trivial fields on a CV like address and name. Quite why is beyond the scope of the study. Maybe it's race, maybe it's class, maybe it's something else. The study isn't designed to be able to say.

 

[shuttlt]

qwints,

I do not see that your quote from BERTRAND AND MULLAINATHAN shows that class and race are independent variables, nor that the information on class and race embedded in a name are independent.

Could you unpack your thinking? They certainly don't say that they are independent in the quote.

If anything I find the quote heartening. Black people living in a good area appear to be perceived better to the same degree as white people. It seems people aren't looking at the CV and thinking that that part of town must have gone downhill, or that they must have bought their house with drug money. This is good, I think. I provisionally withdraw my claim that the study tells us nothing worth knowing.

 

[qwints]

qwints,
Could you unpack your thinking? They certainly don't say that they are independent in the quote.

There was no statistically significant interaction between zip code racial composition, education level or income level and the African-American dummy variable. The fact that they were independent variables (since the resumes were randomly assigned to zip codes, there's no relationship between the name on the resume and the address) isn't the point I was trying to make, and me using that language was confusing.

Black people living in a good area appear to be perceived better to the same degree as white people. It seems people aren't looking at the CV and thinking that that part of town must have gone downhill, or that they must have bought their house with drug money.

Right, which is not what I or the studies authors think you'd expect if perceived blackness simply was taken as a measure of class.

 

[colander]

...when your response to a question about sexism reminded me of one of the reasons why the A+/FTB communities' (you know, the actual thread topic) attitudes to social justice are fundamentally at odds with both traditional social justice and actual critical thinking.

Sorry if I brought the thread back on topic.

A sentiment which very much recalls the Atheism-plusser tendency to attempt to always keep the topic of discussion on rails narrow enough to forestall any possibility of new, interesting and potentially productive discourses from surfacing organically during conversation.

The fact that your response has been to try as hard as you can to personalise the debate has reminded me of yet another reason why the A+/FTB communities annoy me.

This passage is recapitulates the tendency of social justice warriors persist in making a show of being annoyed when people respond to their posts full of disingenous arguments and barely-veiled insults with anything less docile than a curtsy and a smile.

 

[shuttlt]

Right, which is not what I or the studies authors think you'd expect if perceived blackness simply was taken as a measure of class.

I'll respond more fully shortly, but I am puzzled by your wording here. Why do you say "measure" of class? Up until now I think we had been saying that blackness of names correlated with class, or carries information about class. When you say "measure" that implies to me that one expects to find a 1-1 correspondence between predicated class and the blackness of the name regardless of address, or other cues. Is this what you mean?

 

[shuttlt]

The table qwints is relying on is table 6 on page 37 (or at least the paragraph qwints quotes relies on it) of the following:
http://scholar.harvard.edu/mullainathan/files/emilygreg.pdf

I confess I am having some difficulty interpreting the table. I believe I understand the first two rows sufficiently. All it seems to be saying is that they weren't able to detect a significant difference between the degree to which "black" named individuals benefit/suffer from judgements based on where they live as compared to "white" named individuals.

I honestly do not see that that is the same as saying that "black" names are independent of class, or implied class. Say for example that having a "white" name gives you 10 points on the implied class scale, having a "black" name means you lose 10 points. Living in a good area gives you 10 implied class scale points, living in a bad area means you lose 10 points. "Blackness" of name is correlated with class and "black" named individuals benefit to exactly the same degree as "white" named individuals from the area in which they live. Where am I going wrong? Your certainty makes me doubt myself

 

[qwints]

That's the table I'm talking about*. You understand what it's saying - whether or not an applicant had a black name didn't change the effect living in a higher class (whiter, more educated or wealthier) zip code. Also, sorry for introducing the confusion about independent variables - due to the experimental design these two variables are independent by definition but that's trivial.

I understand your hiring model, but I think you can easily see that it's not distinguishable from one that is adding up 'employable' points with separate categories for race and class. Here's why I think the zip code effect on resumes would affect different races differently if the racial disparity was solely attributable to class - an employer's of evaluation of one piece of information about an attribute should be influence by others. In other words, I'm considering this a probabilistic model and not an additive one. If I have two independent clues about a fact, I don't simply add those two clues together. So, I'm thinking of the employers as a group as effectively applying Bayesian reasoning about the applicants.

*There are 3 different city variables interacting with the dummy (i.e. either true or not true) variable for African-American name. So each zip code is being considered in 3 distinct characteristics - how white a neighborhood is (columns 1 and 2), how educated it it (columns 2 and 3) and how wealthy it is (columns 5 and 6). The odd columns are all applicants and the even columns are applicants with African American names. The difference between the two isn't statistically significant.

 

[shuttlt]

qwints,

I hadn't been sure how good your statistical knowledge was. I can see that it is perfectly up to the task.

I have two questions before we continue.

1. Do you dispute that there is socioeconomic information in having a "black" name? To put it more indelicately, that lowclass black people tend to chose "black" names.

2. Assuming you do dispute the above, would it alter your thinking if you agreed?

I'm trying to pin down what we are actually arguing about and what we agree on here.